Recently I’ve been photography training with beginners as well as seasoned wedding photographers. If you would like some training then get in touch and we will get those shots you’re looking to take consistently. Or perhaps you’d like to give someone a more interesting christmas present than twinkly light up socks? I’ve covered photography training in Byfleet, Woking, Weybridge and London. I’m also available to travel so don’t let your location put you off. Right now I’m also offering a training discount for any booking taken until Jan 1st.
Canon cameras invited us to London Fashion Week to photograph a show by designer Julien MacDonald, with a view to producing a set of photos in our style (although we also took a few catwalk fashion shots for fun). You may remember we shot LFW last year, also with CPS (Canon Professional Services); you can view that by looking at our previous London Fashion Week article.
After the show we were shown in to a room where Canon had set up a 360 photography rig at the show called Canon Fashion 360˚ Studio. Utilising many Canon cameras rigged up in a circle to photograph at the same moment, causing anyone in the middle of the rig to have their very own personal freeze frame Matrix moment. Of course myself and Laura had to jump in and you can check it out at the bottom of the post.
Recently we travelled up to London to attend the Leica Akademie: a workshop for users of Leica Cameras to help them get the most from their rangefinder, and we also wanted to pop in and view the Ansel Adams exhibition in Greenwich. Previous to this London visit we had visited the Leica store in Mayfair and met with John Dooley, a Leica instructor who is also an Architectural photographer and previously the photo editor at The Daily Telegraph. After chatting with him over a coffee and playing with a 50mm Noctilux lens (yes please), he mentioned they ran workshops for Leica photographers so I got myself booked on as a good excuse to drink more of their coffee, hang out with other Leica users; and just get in to London to do some street photography which I don’t get much of a chance to do.
The workshop was three hours in total, mixed with people new to Leica along with those more familiar with them. Part of the workshop was heading out on to the streets to take photos for half an hour. It was good fun walking around with the sole intention of taking photos and nothing else.
Below are a few photos from the street part of the day, under pressure to get a few photos within half an hour or so. For those interested, my street photography setup is a Black Leica M9, Gordy hand strap and 50mm Summicron (very occasionally I’ll use a 35mm Summicron). I also use a Sigma DP2 Merrill for certain conditions, a Leica M6 with 50mm Summicron (HP5 film) or a Canon 5D mk3. Most of the time I actually use my trusty mobile phone (Nexus 5X as of 2016) and really enjoy it.
Our thanks go out to John Dooley for a great day and some golden tips; and everyone else at Leica who spent a lot of time to just talk photography with us, it was a great pleasure and we hope we didn’t take up too much of your time. For anyone with a Leica looking to familiarise themselves with the nuances, I recommend getting on the workshop. They are also extending this soon to include more specialised areas like black and white photography.
Canon invited us along to London Fashion week to shoot a couple of collections, including Henry Holland and Alice Temperley’s collections at Somerset House in Central London.
The show was introduced by Caroline Flack and we had a great time shooting from the photographers pit and eating complimentary Kinder Buenos. Being restricted to a narrow space to photograph the catwalk from, posed a challenge to apply our unique documentary style, but one that we really enjoyed and made us think differently.
We had the privilege of being invited by Canon to try the currently unreleased Canon 1Dx at a Karting centre in London. We arrived and were greeted with a table full of the finest lenses and with plenty of 1Dx bodies to go around we were not short of toys to play with. We had also brought along our 1Ds mk3 and Canon 5D3 to compare the 1Dx against.
After trying out the focusing, tracking and ISO capabilities I will say that anyone with a pre-order will not be disappointed, the 1Dx is a serious beast. Tracking the karts around the track was effortless for the 1Dx with entire series of shots in very sharp focus at 12fps.
On more than one occasion as the karts flew past where I was standing I’d sometimes be playing around with settings and then at the last-minute swing the 1Dx up to my eye, hit the focus and shoot. Normally I would be very surprised to even get one in focus being so flippant with my shooting style but the 1Dx was nearing super powers and I found that more often than not I would get a sharp well focused image, usually several in fact due to the speed of the camera.
Already owning the Canon 5D mk3 we were more accustomed to the new high iso capabilities of the new generation of Canon cameras and the 1Dx again is top of its game, changing how we’re going to be shooting certain aspects of work in the future.
